Daily stories of climate death build a Green New Deal!

Summary: The propaganda barrage for the Green New Deal is accelerating. Science plays a small role in them. Every day brings a new crop of articles like this one. Let’s look under its hood and see what we find.

By Kevin Baker in Harper’s, May 2019.

Baker provides an extended argument by analogy. It is propaganda for children – or adults with child-like thinking. Here is a blow-by-blow analysis.

Two-thirds of its 5300 words discuss FDR’s New Deal, although it has little in common with our situation. The history of the New Deal is accurate (although much of the rest is exaggerated or false). Here is the only explanation given why the New Deal history has relevance to us.

“We find ourselves today in much the same place, confronted by an array of emergencies – seemingly disparate, but in fact closely connected – ­that threatens to destroy us.”

That will make little sense to anyone not an avid consumer of doomster literature. The follow-up is misleading.

“Braced against them is a set of ideas put forward in a congressional resolution by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the notorious AOC), a twenty-nine-year-old freshman congresswoman, and her young, ad hoc brain trust.”

Then follows mockery of those that disagree with the GND, such as this bon mot. Plus the occasional moment of honesty: “we must transform the way our political and economic systems work in this country.”

“It’s the future, Dick, if we’re going to have one.”

Between such rare moments of honesty are powerful but mendacious statements like this.

“We have known that man-made, preventable climate change is happening for a long time. …President Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee issued a report highlighting the potential dangers in 1965.”

Very exciting, but the reality is less so. It refers to a 352 page report “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” by The Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. One paragraph of 101 words discusses CO2. Of the 104 recommendations, only three mention CO2 – all calling for more research. For a good reason. Appendix Y4 (pp 111-133) discussing “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” gives this mild conclusion about rising CO2.

“This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate …At present it is impossible to predict these effects quantitatively.”

At last, some climate science.

Finally, 6500 words into the article, it mentions science. But it gives mostly misleadingly, exaggerated, or false information.

“We have increased the temperature of the earth by nearly 1° Celsius since the 1880s …”

No, we have not. Natural warming brought Earth out of the Little Ice Age. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions became a dominant force after WWII. As the WGI Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s AR5 said, “It is extremely likely (95 – 100% certain) that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010.”

“which has led to climate events of unprecedented frequency and ferocity, including terrible fires, hurricanes, the decline and extinction of entire species, and dire food and water shortages that have precipitated wars and refugee crises.”

All of that is fallacious. Not true about wildfires (see here, here, and here). Not true about hurricanes (see this, and also here and here). As for “extinction of entire species”, the first likely case was this year – the Bramble Cay melomys, which lived on an island in the Great Barrier Reef (species living on one island are vulnerable to disruption, and account for a large fraction of threatened species). The claims about wars and migrant flows are quite bogus.

“We are headed rapidly toward doubling that increase to 2 degrees, which could kill off the world’s coral reefs, melt enough global ice to flood every city by a seashore, and turn “the biggest cities of the Middle East and South Asia …lethally hot in summer,” according to the climate journalist David Wallace-Wells writing in a New York Times article headlined ‘Time to Panic.‘”

First, those claims about effects of an additional 1°C of warming are, to be generous, speculative. For example, to “flood every city by a seashore” would take many generations, or even centuries (see below). Second, this is Baker – a novelist and columnist (see Wikipedia) – citing another journalist, David Wallace-Wells. Neither is a scientists or even a journalist covering the sciences. Third, it was a NYT op-ed, not an NYT article. That is a big difference.

“What will happen when we get to a 3-degree, or 4-degree, or 6-degree increase – all incredibly likely, if we continue to do nothing – is so terrible as to be beyond useful contemplation. Suffice it to say, those temperatures will destroy us.”

This is the big lie of climate alarmists. None of those numbers are “incredibly likely.” There are four scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways, RCPs), first used in the IPCC’s AR5. The two likely ones are RCP4.5 and RCP6.0. The worst case scenario, RCP8.5, gets most of the attention. But it is either unlikely or impossible (also see this), as a good worst-case scenario should be. Look at the projections through 2065, for which the projections are moderately reliable. After that there, forecasting becomes less reliable.

About that “flood every city by a seashore” – look at one paper’s projections of global sea level rise by 2100 for each RCP (S.Jevrejeva et al. in Global and Planetary Change, January 2012. Open copy here.). The ranges are large, since many of the factors are poorly understood. The average for the two middle (i.e., likely) scenarios are under three feet of rise by 2100. Easily manageable for most cities, although those underwater and sinking (e.g., Venice and New Orleans) might join the list of cities submerged over past millennia by the rising seas.

Conclusions

“A student in Wendy Petersen Boring’s climate-change-focused class said she woke at 2 a.m. and then cried for two solid hours about the warming ocean. …Petersen Boring, an associate professor of history, religious studies, women & gender studies at Willamette University in Oregon, has been teaching about climate change for a little over a decade. In that short time, she has watched her students’ fear, grief, stress and anxiety grow.” {From CNN.}

Most of these climate doomsters articles have three defining characteristics. First, they’re written by journalists – not even science reporters. Second, they ignore the IPCC and major climate agencies – citing alarmists and other journalists. Third, climate scientists ignore their exaggerations and even falsehoods. As the ancient adage says, silence means complicity (see here and here).

But these articles debunking the alarmists are futile. They are long and complex vs. alarmists’ exciting and simple stories. The alarmists will dominate the public media until climate scientists speak out. Alarmists are polluting the public policy debate, making rational decisions more difficult. So we are unprepared not just for likely climate change, but for the repeat of past extreme weather. The price of our folly might be large.

For More Information

Important – Media phenomena like Greta Thunberg don’t just happen. They result from careful work by powerful special interest groups. See how she became an icon for the climate apocalypse: “Greta Inc.” by William Walter Kay at Friends of Science.

Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

One Comment on “Daily stories of climate death build a Green New Deal!”

I went through this when communist dogma called for fewer US power plants and was duped into believing reactors were relatively unsafe (hence we should Freeze and surrender). After those embarrassing lies came demands that good freon be banned because ozone over the antarctic volcano was thinner than above the equator (where 8/9 of all people live). Now that bad freon is breaking refrigeration equipment, temperature data is faked so coercive con artists can avoid repealing the ban on good freon and instead blame imaginary warming for breaking your AC. And the same whack jobs push each fable.